Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  Jody washes dishes at “this bar down on Calla Boulevard” four nights a week and is helping a man fix his barn. What Jody really wants is a job at the sawmill, she says. That’s where the good jobs are. Jody shakes her head and runs her fingers through her short, fuzzy hair. Jody says there are ghosts in the mines above town if you’re stupid enough to believe in that stuff. Jody smells vaguely like wood. Jody is intimate but guarded. Jody seems to be inviting Anna Lisa somewhere, but she’s not about to give away the directions.

  When Anna Lisa’s shake is half gone and there is only an inch of bitter-tasting beer left in the bottle, a Negro woman walks into the restaurant. She wears a red dress that matches her lipstick and clutches her purse with both hands. When she spots Jody, she lets her purse slide down her arm and swing on her elbow.

  “That’s my girl,” Jody says to Anna Lisa without taking her eyes off the woman.

  Can a girl have a girl? Can a white girl have a black girl? The possibilities make Anna Lisa’s head throb. Could she have a girl?

  Jody makes introductions: Imogen, Anna Lisa. Anna Lisa, Imogen. There were three Negroes at Lincoln High School. Anna Lisa knew each of their names and never had occasion to talk to any of them. Imogen is standing so close Anna Lisa can see the clumps of mascara on her eyelashes. And she’s Jody’s girl. Anna Lisa feels slightly dizzy. Maybe it’s the beer.

  “We’re going over to Lilac’s,” Jody says. “It’s the bar where I work, ’cept I’m off tonight. Wanna come?”

  Imogen looks at Jody, alarmed. “Is she cool?”

  Jody smiles. “I’ve got a hunch.”

  Imogen has not touched Jody, but from the way she rolls her eyes beneath her mascara and her night-blue eyeshadow, Anna Lisa knows they have been together a long time and that they are in love. “Your hunches are always getting us in trouble. But I’m not one to be rude. Anna Lisa, you said your name was? Come on with us.”

  They leave Main Street behind and begin climbing Calla Boulevard, a steep street with older buildings and shorter streetlights. Anna Lisa studies the figures in front of her on the narrow sidewalk. Jody’s love handles, her echoing work boots that hint at hollows beneath the pavement, her hair that might be called strawberry blonde if the title didn’t seem somehow undignified. Imogen clicks along next to her. Thin waist and unashamed breasts wrapped in rose print. Her black hair is curled in a controlled and intricate pattern. Her arm swings next to Jody’s, occasionally brushing it. As if this were all perfectly natural.

  Anna Lisa’s breath quickens as they climb. And we’re going to a bar, she thinks.

  Jody stops abruptly in front of a squat, wood-sided building. There’s no sign over the closed door, but a rectangular halo of light surrounds it. The night has turned chilly, and Anna Lisa imagines it’s warm inside. When Jody halts, Anna Lisa bumps into her.

  “Okay, here’s the rules,” Jody says. “No putting the moves on somebody else’s girl, but I don’t think you’re dumb enough to do that. No nursing one beer all night—you’re in a bar, you drink. And if Caleb flashes the light, it means stop dancing or switch to a guy, ’cause the cops are coming.”

  Imogen puts a hand on Anna Lisa’s shoulder. It’s warm and heavy. “We don’t have cops. We have one sheriff who bothers with us maybe once every two months. Just breathe, honey.”

  Anna Lisa doesn’t know what the insides of regular bars look like. She doesn’t know the names of beers. She thinks 90 cents sounds expensive, but she can’t be sure. She’s never danced with anyone besides her own relatives at weddings.

  The first beer has already rendered the night twirly, but she follows Jody’s lead and orders a Rheingold. Her voice is so quiet that Caleb, a thin man with dark, center-parted hair and a blue turtleneck sweater—what Anna Lisa imagines a poet might look like—makes her repeat it twice. She hands him her money and silently says goodbye to her trip home.

  “You gotta tip, honey,” Imogen whispers.

  The bar is dark with low ceilings. But the people: Anna Lisa’s entire body tingles like a sleeping limb awakening. There are more women like Jody. They prop elbows on the bar, extend booted feet into walkways, emit low whistles at pretty girls. Upon seeing these women who act like men, Anna Lisa is startled by just how differently the sexes carry themselves. The women who look like Imogen—except white—slide into the gazes of the Jodies. They figure-eight around tables and pull their limbs inward in a way that somehow exposes as it conceals: crossed legs revealing a sliver of thigh, crossed arms summoning cleavage. None of them look like the girls of 3-B, but Anna Lisa realizes this bar is nevertheless her book. The black ink has lifted; she’s been invited to look and look.

  LILAC

  Felix: Lilac Mines, 2002

  When Felix wakes up, her side hurts so badly she can barely sit up. Last night she ordered pizza and ate it alone in her room. Her dreams were threaded with Eva and hot-breathed men who looked like Eva. Both seemed out to get her. It’s late morning now, and she’s thankful that Anna Lisa is already at work.

  She rises slowly, swallows a handful of Advil, and takes her sketchpad out to the deck. She tries to draw the mountains. But what appears green-brown and majestic in person becomes gray and lumpy on paper, and soon all she has to show for her efforts is a pile of eraser crumbs. Nature is the opposite of fashion, which always looks sleeker and funkier before it’s translated into cloth and thread.

  Her pencil moves clumsily and her head pounds with questions. Where is Eva right now? Where is she, really? What is this nearly vertical town—will the thick-trunked trees and rows of cabins protect her? Anna Lisa won’t, that much is clear. But what other choice does she have? An art student named Genevieve Barilla has sublet her room in L.A. through October. She doesn’t want to live with her parents. She can’t afford to move to New York.

  Felix gives up on the mountains, goes back inside and takes a shower. She puts on a pair of knee-length cargo shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that says, “Dump Him.” But when she studies herself in the guest room mirror, she decides against the outfit. She doesn’t want to encourage anyone to dump anyone right now, she tells herself. There’s nothing funny about getting dumped. That’s what it is.

  But the ensemble she settles on is decidedly less dykey: a royal blue secondhand cheerleading skirt, an asymmetrical tank top and tall reddish-purple legwarmers. She poses, tugging at her top to make sure it covers her bandage. She feels a little better, although she is now officially all dressed up with no place to go.

  So she goes to Kate’s Kappuccino, even though it reminds her of Kate Mendoza-Lishman, even though she hates dorky misspellings. There’s only one woman working at the small shop, so there’s a line. Felix waits behind a chubby man wearing overalls and a bowl cut. What self-respecting hairstylist would agree to give him that awful cut? she wonders.

  The bell dings and two teenage girls enter. They’re 14 or 15, an age when girls dress alike without even knowing it: flared jeans with faux fade marks bleached across the hips, ponytails, baby tees in bright colors. The air conditioning is blasting. Felix wraps her arms around her bandaged body and wonders if she should order a hot drink instead of an iced “frappukato.” As she studies the menu, she hears the girls giggling.

  “What is she wearing?” one of them whispers. At first Felix thinks they’re talking about the man in the overalls, but no, she definitely heard “she.”

  “Hello, Flashdance!” the other one giggles.

  “What’s Flashdance?”

  “Remember I told you—that movie my mom made me watch when she did that mother-daughter slumber party thing?”

  Felix feels her face turn red. Her legs start to itch beneath the legwarmers that these little Lilac Mines teenyboppers are not advanced enough to understand. She looks around. No one here is. She is completely defenseless.

  “Maybe she’s a cheerleader—from Beedleborough or something.”

  “No, their colors are red and silver. Besides, she’s, like, old.”

 
“Shh… she’ll hear you.”

  Felix might as well be naked. Her thighs feel like a map of ugly blue veins. In a shaky voice she orders a grande black coffee. She can’t drink coffee without a lot of accessories, but she’s not about to hang out by the cream and sugar bar, so she shuffles out of Kate’s, head down.

  In the safety of her car, she peels off her legwarmers and tries not to cry. I hope they remember me when legwarmers are all over the Gap a year from now, she thinks, but she knows they won’t. Is that even what she wants to be remembered for? She wipes her eyes with a wadded-up legwarmer. Fuck all of this. Fuck Lilac Mines and Anna Lisa. She wishes she could live in her car. She wishes she had the strength not to care what people thought. She takes a deep breath and turns the key in the ignition. Maybe she’ll just drive around.

  Fiddling with the radio dial, she finds three country stations and four Bible shows. “Well, ma’am, I’m glad you asked. As you know, God has a plan for each of us. As the Lord Jesus Christ said in….” Why do Bible-thumpers always refer to Jesus by his full name? Felix wonders. But there’s something appealing about the man’s voice. It is rich and comforting and self-assured. As if he knows exactly what God’s plan is. She envies the caller: just phone in and receive God’s prescription, then go to the nearest church and fill it. But if Felix called in, the man would quote from Leviticus (she’s pretty sure that’s the God-Hates-Fags part) and prescribe some sort of conversion program. She’s screwed in all worlds.

  Sighing, she turns off the radio and pulls into the nearest parking spot. Looking up, she sees she’s in front of the Lilac Mines Visitors’ Center, a log cabin sandwiched between an auto shop and a café that, of course, promises cappuccino. At least a government-funded educational facility is likely to be free of preachers and too-cool teenagers. She gets out of the car and pours her coffee on the ground, making a thin black river in the dust.

  Inside, Felix is greeted by an assortment of stuffed dead animals. Apparently posing them in “natural” positions and surrounding them with dried plants—instead of mounting their heads on wooden plaques—makes them scientific rather than artifacts of machismo.

  She must have quite a look on her face because the ranger behind the counter says kindly, “Most of ’em were roadkill.”

  “Uh, I guess that’s good,” Felix offers.

  “Doing the Gold Rush country tour?” She has two yellow braids, a Midwestern accent, and a badge that says “Ranger LeVoy.” She leans forward enthusiastically, her plump arms folded on the counter.

  “No.” Felix doesn’t feel like talking, but Ranger LeVoy waits for a more complete answer. “I’m visiting my aunt.”

  “Oh? And what’s her name?”

  “Anna Lisa Hill.”

  “That’s right, I should have known, you look just like her.” Ranger LeVoy nods energetically. “She works search and rescue, you know. Of course you know.”

  “She’s a nurse. Maybe you’re thinking of a different Anna Lisa?”

  “This town’s not that big,” Ranger LeVoy laughs. “She works for the volunteer squad. You didn’t know? She saved a couple of crazies who tried to hike the Sierras in the wintertime just a few months back.”

  “Seriously?” Felix tries to picture her aunt hoisting herself up the face of a mountain, or whatever search and rescue people do.

  “Yeah, all those search and rescue folks are great. But super modest. Don’t let her get away with not telling you about it.”

  Felix sighs. She tries to concentrate on the sepia tone photos and blocks of text interspersed with the carnage. Bearded men with pickaxes stare back at her, as if she sent them down in the deep black mines. Here and there a testament to the gargantuan nature of mining: a rusted bolt the size of her fist, a slice of the beam that held up a stamp mill, cut from a 200-year-old tree. Things that could crush her to dust.

  She follows the story on laminated cardboard. Lilac Mines, a silver town in Gold Rush country, did its best business from the 1860s through the 1890s, when it was still referred to as East Beedleborough. Mineshafts shot through the mountain like bullets, and the mountain bled silver. Teams of mules lugged the ore to a V-shaped trough that snaked down the mountain to the stamp mill. Once crushed, the ore stewed in vats of cyanide until the silver let go of the rock.

  “Still cyanide in the ground water,” Ranger LeVoy says cheerfully. “I’d stick to bottled Arrowhead if I were you. We all do.” Six days a week, the town shook to the rhythm of the stamp mill. Immense iron wheels engraved with their places of origin—Los Angeles or San Francisco—pounded out the shape of a new place.

  There was also a sawmill on the eastern side of town, just above the mining camps, where the less glamorous half of mining took place. Trees were felled, planed square, and more mules pulled them up the mountain, where they shored up the mine, making a hole in the rock look like a saloon entrance. Rustic but welcoming. Miles and miles of wood lined the mines, and as the trees vanished from the eastern half of East Beedleborough, the mountain was, in a way, turned inside out.

  The town became a boomtown, which was not unlike a city, except that everything was the same age and everyone thought they’d be leaving soon, even as they hung curtains and planted telegraph poles—in a straight line, because who knew if electricity could bend? The women held quilting bees at the church. The men joined E Clampus Vitus, the miners’ fraternal order. “Both good places to gossip,” says Ranger LeVoy.

  Then, in 1899, the 16-year-old daughter of mine foreman Harold Ambrose walked into a mine entrance at the top of the town and never walked out. No one knew why Lilac Ambrose had gone there in the first place. Her father wasn’t even working that day. No one knew much about Lilac Ambrose at all. For 20 days, the men and the mules searched the hollows of the mountain. Lanterns swinging and voices calling as loudly as was possible without causing a cave-in. They found a few artifacts. Girl things—a shoe button, a hair ribbon. The latter hangs on a nail behind glass. But they didn’t find Lilac or Lilac’s body. They started calling the town Lilac Mines. They even wrote it into the hillside, a giant LM made of tiny white pebbles, but Harold Ambrose was still broken-hearted.

  Within ten years, the mine dried up. The mountain was like a person who’d cried so hard he had no more tears. The people who’d talked about moving back—to Chicago, Hartford, Iowa City, to the tenements of New York—finally did. Or they moved forward.

  History stops at the 1920s. Lilac Mines becomes a ghost town. The end. But there are people here now, plenty of them. Still, Felix concedes, it would be weird to see color photos from, say, the 1960s alongside the stuffed snakes and rusty pickaxes. History has to be black-and-white and rust-colored.

  “The sawmill re-opened in the ’40s,” Ranger LeVoy volunteers. “But they ripped most of the mine equipment apart and used the metal in the War. Hey, did you see our collection of scented bath products?” She gestures to a basket next to the donation box. “They’re all-natural and all the proceeds go to E Clampus Vitus.”

  “The fraternal order? It’s still around?” Felix is feeling just slightly more sociable.

  “Oh yeah, except now it’s just a bunch of old guys who want to preserve mining history. I doubt any of ’em were actual miners.”

  “And they’re selling lotion?” Felix picks up a bottle. “And eucalyptus-scented bath oil?”

  Ranger LeVoy nods happily. “All natural.”

  The hair ribbon draws Felix back to the glass case devoted to Lilac Ambrose. A nail pierces the ribbon like an exotic insect, but it’s limp and frayed, and Felix can’t tell what color it was originally. It’s embroidered with tiny rosebuds that remind Felix of the old flatware her parents had before they upgraded to a Southwest pattern. Pink rosebuds freckling the rims of plates and the tops of mugs. Most of it’s gone, but a few pieces migrated to Felix’s apartment. She closes her eyes and sees one of the mugs on Eva’s rickety end table. She can’t remember why she took a cup to Eva’s loft. Just that it teetered there, so feminine a
nd precarious in its hip surroundings.

  Did Lilac leave the ribbon behind as a marker, like that guy in the myth about the maze? Or did it slip from her braid? Felix touches the back of her own head, as if she might find answers there. She wants to tie the ribbon in a bow. She wants to know more. Why did this girl go into the mine, why didn’t she come out, when did she make the transition from exploring to panicking? There are obvious questions, and more basic but elusive ones. Who was she, besides Harold’s daughter? It takes a certain kind of girl to venture into a dark tunnel alone.

  She wills herself to chat with Ranger LeVoy. “Did she go in there all by herself?”

  “Guess so. They say her ghost still haunts the town.” Ranger LeVoy’s eyes get Halloween-big, but her mouth keeps smiling. “We’re not allowed to put that in the literature, though. Just the facts.”

  “Has anyone ever looked for her body—well, her bones, I guess—in recent times? I mean, now that there’s more technology and stuff?”

  Ranger LeVoy shrugs and smiles.

  Felix looks at the panoramic pictures blown up so big that they are a swarm of Georges Seurat dots. She cannot believe that the bald spot on the mountain wasn’t always desert. There were no sign of tree stumps when she drove through. She can’t believe that kind of erasure is possible, as if the trees never happened, as if killing them never happened.

  There are no pictures of Lilac. There’s a group photo of sour-looking miners with a red arrow glued next to Harold Ambrose’s head. He has a thin face and deep-set eyes. He looks older than the father of a 16-year-old. Felix’s eyes roam the rows of miners. Collectively, the haggard men look like they could use a union. Except for one in the front row. He is young and shirtless, with bulging pecs, a straight nose and a cocky smile. Oddly white for pre-fluoride days.

  Felix knows that smile. It’s the kind that asks, “How ’bout you do my buddy a favor?” Her stomach drops. Maybe it’s the kind of smile that lures a 16-year-old into a mineshaft.